Just might work. Don't forget we have many people that have influenced history via sarcasm or joke's. Lenny Bruce arrests leading to George Carlins list of 7 things you cannot say on the air. Leading to court cases... Which lead up to a refined perspective of what might be accepted. I still have never understood the rules, but it seems that it's more understandable by those that deal with Media.

So looking for someone that has a following, and that following can effectively make a change in the world (think

What they are doing is trying to hunt down and substantiate those quietly influencing the whole of the internet, not accidentally but purposefully via memes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org] hidden in sarcasm, those being political and social memes not kitten memes. So what they will be doing is backtracking ideas and changes to existing ideas from larger more spread elements of internet media and attempting to track them back to original sources based upon date of occurrence and looking for repeated patte

Actually, what they could do would be to correlate English language postings with equivalent German language postings. As Germans are known world wide for their fun-loving sense of humor and sarcastic wits, the difference should yield accurate, non-snarky posts in English.

Why would the Secret Service, in particular, want to tell sarcasm apart from other speech? Think about who they are.

They want to be able to distinguish sarcastic political speech, from sincere political speech. Of course both are protected speech.

Now, they might have a benign purpose, but from the description in TFA it doesn't seem so. After all, the administration would look pretty foolish if they tried to harass or jail someone for being sarcastic.

After all, the administration would look pretty foolish if they tried to harass or jail someone for being sarcastic.

It really depends on what you're veing sarcastic about from the perspective of the Secret Service.

If you sarcastically say "'some guy' should be drowned in a vat of gazpacho and gummy bears while 16 clowns play the William Tell overture on kazoos", and their job is to protect 'some guy' (fill in your own blank here)... one presumes the intent to tell the difference between random stupid thing

Why would the Secret Service, in particular, want to tell sarcasm apart from other speech? Think about who they are.

They want to be able to distinguish sarcastic political speech, from sincere political speech. Of course both are protected speech.

Now, they might have a benign purpose, but from the description in TFA it doesn't seem so. After all, the administration would look pretty foolish if they tried to harass or jail someone for being sarcastic.

Why would the Secret Service, in particular, want to tell sarcasm apart from other speech? Think about who they are.

They want to be able to distinguish sarcastic political speech, from sincere political speech. Of course both are protected speech.

Not all political speech is protected. A threat to harm the President of the US is specifically not protected speech. The Secret Service is particularly concerned with such threats, and is in fact charged with keeping tabs on everyone who has ever threatened the president.

If you've ever publically made such a threat, there's a chance an agent will knock on your door and politely sit with you for a few hours while the president is in town. Think about the logistics of that. It would get quite out of hand

I've heard accounts of people doing just that, funnily enough. As the Secret Service currently lacks a sarcasm detector it's not just lonely weirdos they drop in on, and they're probably used to spending an afternoon with random families.

If political speech is protected, why exactly are they tracking it? Why is it important to identify the ringleaders of popular opinion? Isn't it a waste of effort to track something you're not theoretically allowed to use?

because saying, "Mitch McConnell/Barack Obama/Nancy Pelosi/Cliven Bundy/Tom Hanks is a cancer on our country and must be stopped by any means necessary" from someone who has the ability and influence to convince other people to possibly shoot said persons IS illegal. It's incitement to violence.

However, being able to mechanically determine, "Obama should be dragged out to the street and shot" and "I have an AK-47 and want to kill Obama" aren't equal would go a long way to helping an agency that has a pretty

Donovan’s example is a 2009 inauguration problem in which people were trapped in a Capitol tunnel and unable to reach the security gates. If the Secret Service had known through real-time social media, they could have remedied the situation more quickly.

That's true. But if they had gotten a message by carrier pigeon that people were stuck in the tunnel they could also have remedied the situation./sarcasm

Or, why not just allow free speech? Why do we have to identify sarcasm? Maybe part of the expression of the message is its ambiguity.

Well, as much as I don't like to defend it...

Imagine that the Secret Service is, oh, I don't know, responsible for assessing threats to various people.

Now, some random internet loon says "grrr, I'm so angry I want to air drop a million pounds of used condoms, Snickers wrappers and Depends undergarments onto Capitol Hill in protest" -- now, you have two possibilities:

Important clarification for any sarcasm impaired law enforcement agencies:

The above example was contrived to be the most outrageous (and therefore least plausible) example I could think of.

You won't know I wasn't joking until you're awash in used condoms, Snickers wrappers, and Depends undergarments air lifted from my herd of flying elephants. The elephant poop is just a freebie since the Depends don't fit the elephants.

So, then you either get actual attacks happening nobody took seriously. Or the men in dark sunglasses hauling you off in the night for questioning because they're 100% convinced that your threat to drop the condoms, Snickers wrappers, and Depends on Capitol Hill was real.

Which scenario do you think is more likely? Furthermore, if anyone is a real threat, there will be much more intelligence (as in evidence of a threat) surrounding that individual than their tweets. Arresting people based solely on their

"Someone had said something to the effect of 'Oh you're insane, you're crazy, you're messed up in the head,'" he called, "to which he replied 'Oh yeah, I'm real messed up in the head, I'm going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts.'"

According to Carter, he ended the quip with "LOL" and "JK" -- Internet shorthand for "laugh out loud" and "just kidding," respectively.

It's a real thing, it has happened already. No evidence of a crime (or even the actual intent to commit one). But someone sees it and goes "eep", and then you get dragged off to jail.

Arresting people based solely on their tweets or FB posts will very rapidly devolve into an outright ban of saying anything critical of government officials or policy -- AKA fascism.

You seem to be under the impression this isn't happening already.

It is.

So, ask me again if I think what I said is a plausible scenario. Because I said it with the full knowledge it has already happened.

Thank you for making my point for me. It has already happened, so it will again. It sounds like, even though you started your first reply with, "Well, as much as I don't like to defend it...", you've talked yourself out of defending it. We are, therefore, in agreement. Now, let's go get a beer.

The automated detection of sarcasm and derision will be one of the fastest growing segments in the new economy.

Already at least 3 startups have begun with this included in their mission statement, along with a stated goal of relieving venture capitalists from the burden of their investment money.

It is of vital national importance that we identify who is merely being a dismissive arrogant douchebag, and who is at risk of inadvertently hurting someone else's feelings so we send them for re-education and thought alignment. It will also help to identify people who haven't yet fully swallowed the kool-aid and don't believe that the government is, in fact, here to help us, uphold the Constitution, and defend our rights.

The US Secret Service is going to aggressively fund a second mandate to decode the mysteries of eye rolling, sneering, and derisive snorts.

This should further embolden the usage of widespread warrantless collection of our personal information with the knowledge that law enforcement agencies will be able to accurately detect sarcasm and redirect scarce resources to fondling young children and old people in airport security lines.

A spokesperson for the Treasury Department indicated that popular internet forum Slashdot, as well as Digg and 4Chan will be used as exemplars for this technology, as these have been identified as the single largest sources of snark on the interwebs since Al Gore invented it.

It has been further reported that Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has said he welcomes this new initiative in the spirit of cooperation between the two countries, and that Kim Jon Un is hoping this will lead to a normalization of relations as it will allow the US to realize that North Korea was only kidding.

A spokesperson for the Treasury Department indicated that popular internet forum Slashdot, as well as Digg and 4Chan will be used as exemplars for this technology, as these have been identified as the single largest sources of snark on the interwebs since Al Gore invented it.

The Brits will now need to close up the Sarcasm Gap, but at least they have their own strategic snark reserves in the form of B3ta and The Register.

Human brains, even the bigger one's here on/., often miss sarcasm. It's one of those subtle things that varies immensely with context, intelligence, context, etc.
Then again, software can hardly do worse than the Secret Service at differentiating things like "real" from "make believe". For you new kids, please see http://www.sjgames.com/SS/ [sjgames.com]

I am certainly glad to see my tax dollars spent on worthy high tech and expensive efforts by the Secret Service and NSA. They should continue to spend with no concern for rationality. If you don't want to pay $100 billion a year to watch what people are doing you clearly have something to hide. The Tea Party should also continue hate big government, but also support unlimited spending on anti-terror efforts.
#snark

Which is something of a problem, since the internet is so full of 'patriots' declaring it is their duty (often god-given duty) to rebel against the tyranny of the government. And very nearly all of them are just spouting hot air.

They seem to have a very low tolerance of tyranny. Valid reasons for rebellion appear to include 'The gubmint is trying to feed my children salad,' 'The gubmint isn't thanking Jebus at council meeting any more' and, most terrible of all, 'The Gubmint says gay people can marry now.'